Mark Irwin's boyhood near the nuclear laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, haunts his poetry. This book of three elegies explores the nature of remembered time and space-personal, historical, geological-against the progression of time-evolution, germination, cell division, nuclear fission, the decay of memory and feeling. This, the poet says, is a kind of "fossil record" of science's impact on the modern world. Entropy (the tendency of atoms towards disorder) becomes a god, a blueprint for possibility. Disorder-frenzy, darkness, chaos-leads to evolution and evolution to order, harmony, and beauty. A star burns and sunlight falls on the world.
- ISBN10 081951151X
- ISBN13 9780819511515
- Publish Date 4 November 1988 (first published 5 October 1988)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Publisher University Press of New England
- Imprint Wesleyan University Press
- Format Paperback
- Pages 79
- Language English